Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Power Tools for Windows

    Scott Hanselman has a great list of the power tools he uses for Windows and development. It’s worth a read, and worth checking some of them out. I have used quite a few of these tools over the years, and I find them great, however I’m definitely considering trying a few of his recommendations out.

    Ones I like:

    • Paint.NET – Beware the big download buttons that take you to GIMP. Click download at the top and follow the text.
    • 7-Zip – I moved to this a few years ago and it works great. Is it better than others? No idea, but it works well and easily for me. It doesn’t get in the way.
    • DropBox – This works well for me. Is it better than Box, or Live Mesh? I still use LiveMesh, but this gives me a nice integration with a lot of iPhone apps.
    • SysInternals – If you admin a network or an AD domain, you need these.
    • PowerShell – If you work with SQL Server, spend a few minutes working with this. Here’s a cheat sheet.
    • ZoomIt –  If you present, drop this on every machine, and a flash drive.
    • TortoiseSVN – Use a VCS, any of them.
    • Skype– I’ve also tried Oovoo, but size matters. Skype works well for me.
    • Bart’s Preinstalled Enviroment (BartPE) – Saved my wife one time
    • DVDDecrypter– With kids this is handy. Rip your own DVDs and give the kids the copy.

    The tools I am interested in trying from the list:

    • Boot to VHD – I’ve heard a lot about it and maybe it will make things simpler. When (if?) I go back to a Windows laptop, I might try this.
    • LogParser – On my list as a way to dig through log files in Windows.
    • Hiren’s BootCD – Probably worth keeping around
    • SyncBack -Windows Home Server is a POS for me. Looking for a basic file server and scheduled backups.

    If you have your own recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

  • A traveling man

    It’s been a long year for me. This year I’ve attended:

    1. SQL Saturday #60 – Cleveland
    2. SQL Saturday #66 – Colorado Springs
    3. MVP Summit
    4. Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta v3.0
    5. SQL Saturday #63 – Dallas
    6. SQL Saturday #77 – Pensacola
    7. SQL in the City – London
    8. SQL Saturday #64 – Baton Rouge
    9. SQL Saturday #91 – Oklahoma City
    10. SQLBits #9
    11. PASS Summit
    12. SQL in the City – LA
    13. DevConnections Fall 2011
    14. SQL Inspire NYC

    That’s a lot of trips, and a lot of time away from home. It’s also possible I missed one or two in all the chaos of the year.

    Next year will be much quieter for me. I’ve already avoided a few trips, telling some people that I would not be attending their events in an effort to slow down and not be so burned out with travel.

    It’s been a good year, but a hard one and next year needs to be a little quieter for me.

  • Autogrow guidelines

    I always enable autogrow on my databases. However, it’s there for emergencies, not as a space management tool. I monitor disk space, and I grow my files manually as space runs low. I want to control the growth, but in the event of a runaway process or some unexpected event, I want autogrow enabled to hopefully prevent a database crash.

    What level of autogrow do you enable? That was a question I saw recently and it made me stop and think a bit. I asked the question on Twitter, but got very few responses and no real guidance from others.

    In my mind, you want to enable a specific level of autogrow that will be likely to handle something unexpected in a single, or maybe a couple growths.

    The two options for autogrowth are:

    • percentage
    • fixed size growth

    In general I think a fixed size growth is the setting to choose. This offers more control and as your database size grows, it’s unlikely you want to grow at a percentage. A 10% growth of a 100MB database is 10MB, almost a rounding error on many of today’s drives.

    However a 10% growth on a 2TB database is 200GB, which could easily exceed the free space on the drives that make up a file,which is where you set the autogrow specifications:

    autogrow1

    As the file size increases, the disk space goes down, but the percentage growth goes up as well, exacerbating the problem.

    So what are the guidelines?

    I think that you have to look at the data growth and each database and what is possible for data growth in that database. Some some database that does ETL work I think it’s more likely you could have an unexpected large or duplicate import in a process that would cause larger growth.

    However the question I was asked talked about setting a guideline for hundreds of databases, where in the short term it’s impractical to review every database. For those, I offer up these guidelines, though I’m happy to have someone give better guidance.

    MDF Size File Autogrowth
    < 1GB 100MB
    1GB < mdf size < 50GB 2GB
    50GB < mdf size < 200GB 5GB
    200GB < mdf < 1TB 10GB
    > 1TB 50GB

     

    These are guesses on my part, based on some experience, but the largest database I ever managed was a 600GB one, so I’m guessing on the TB scale.

    I’d welcome your comments and experience in this area.

  • Forgiving Mistakes

    My main phone line at the house has been on the fritz for about 3-4 weeks. Yes, we still have a main line and it’s a legacy holdover from having that number for a decade and it links do our DSL account. We may get rid of it at some point, but for now we wanted it working. We actually weren’t aware it was down until a service repairperson told us when they arrived. We checked, and sure enough, no dial tone.

    My wife and I are somewhat savvy and we tried to debug it, but it was down. With travel and holidays, it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that we called CenturyLink for service and I was pleasantly surprised by a technician arriving in the early afternoon.

    He tried a few things in the house, then set up a tone generator and drove back out to the street. Yep, he drove. My driveway is 1/4 mile long and it’s another 1/4 mile to the paved road, and a mile and a half to the main road.

    About ten minutes later he came back and said things were fixed. We checked, and sure enough, we had dial tone. He then explained what happened: our line was cut.

    I was surprised and worried, until he explained that when you service lines in the boxes, there is often a little extra wire on a connection. Small scissors are used to snip that off and clean the connections, but there are a lot of wires in there and sometimes one gets accidently cut by a tech. He surmised that another tech was in a hurry and accidently got one of our lines (we have two). He apologized again, we shook hands and went on our ways.

    My Reaction

    I wasn’t quite sure how to react to the situation after that. Should I complain to CentuyLink and seek some credit on our bill? Should I vent on the Internet about shoddy workmanship? In the end, I told my wife it was fixed, explained what happened, and we both let it drop.

    Andy Leonard wrote a great piece on stress during the holidays with a very important section on forgiveness. I forgave CenturyLink because it seemed like the right thing to do. A few dollars on my bill aren’t worth the time it would take me to call and the aggravation I’d cause myself and some customer service representative in order to file a complaint and seek credit.

    I make mistakes at work. Heck, I make them all the time, and I don’t expect to be banned, burned at the stake, or excommunicated for them. They’re mistakes. I learn from them, I try not to make them again, I try to do my best, but I know that there will be a few that I make.

    I expect my co-workers will make mistakes, and I have to live with some of those. I might be annoyed, or inconvenienced, but I understand that most of the time they are just that, mistakes.

    I wonder sometimes if we’ve forgotten how to forgive in this world, forgotten how to tolerate the imperfections that exist in all of us, and in the work we do.